Such is the brief record that marks the passing away of a man whose place in the love and veneration of Wesley and of the Methodists was unique. Second only to the great leader himself in his influence, and in the special character of that influence leaving even Wesley behind, Fletcher's loss was the greatest sustained by the Revival from the death of Whitefield, in 1770, to that of Wesley, in 1791. One word in the short obituary notice reveals the secret of his power; it was holiness.
The term saint, in the New Testament extended to all the members of Christ, is often used colloquially to describe any one who, in comparison with worldly men or mere formal Christians, is conspicuous for reality and earnestness of spiritual life; but it may be applied to Fletcher in that last and highest sense, which makes it so rare a designation even of the best men. He possessed in an exceptional degree the qualities that constitute saintliness: deep humility and transparent purity, absolute unworldliness, with love unfailing, and patience that had its perfect work. The impression that he made upon those with whom he came in contact has been renewed upon biographers and historians.
"Fletcher was a saint," is the testimony of earlier and later witnesses. To none of his associates in the great Revival, the goodliest company of Christian men the age possessed, is this testimony borne in the same sense and with the same entire agreement. He was excelled by them in one respect and another; he could not, for example, sustain comparison for a moment with Wesley in the commanding powers, intellectual and moral, that have placed him among the greatest leaders of the Church Catholic; but for seraphic piety, for sanctity that had no perceptible spot or flaw, Fletcher of Madeley stood alone. This is the deliberate judgment of those who knew him best. Of these Wesley was the chief. In the funeral sermon which he preached soon after Fletcher's death he said: "I was intimately acquainted with him for above thirty years. I conversed with him morning, noon, and night, without the least reserve, during a journey of many hundred miles. And in all that time I never heard him speak an improper word, or saw him do an improper action. To conclude: Many exemplary men have I known, holy in heart and life, within fourscore years; but one equal to him I have not known, one so inwardly and outwardly devoted to God. So unblamable a character in every respect I have not found either in Europe or America, and I scarce expect to find another such on this side eternity."
Benson, for many years the intimate friend of Fletcher, wrote to Wesley as follows: "I have often thought the testimony that Bishop Burnet bears of Archbishop Leighton might be borne of him with equal propriety: 'After an intimate acquaintance of many years, and after being with him by night and by day, at home and abroad, in public and in private, ... I must say, I never heard an idle word drop from his lips, or any conversation which was not to the use of edifying. I never saw him in any temper in which I myself would not have wished to be found at death.' Any one who has been intimately acquainted with Mr. Fletcher will say the same of him, and they who knew him best will say it with the most assurance."
All other contemporary notices of Fletcher are in the same strain. So with the historians and biographers of subsequent times. "Fletcher in any communion would have been a saint," says Southey. "He was a saint," wrote Isaac Taylor, "as unearthly a being as could tread the earth at all." "Fletcher," says Robert Hall, "is a seraph who burns with the ardour of Divine love. Spurning the fetters of mortality, he almost habitually seems to have anticipated the rapture of the beatific vision."
These testimonies may be closed, though they are not exhausted, by a passage from one of the most recent and valuable works on the religious life of the last century:[1] "If John Wesley was the great leader and organiser, Charles Wesley the great poet, and George Whitefield the great preacher of Methodism, the highest type of saintliness which it produced was unquestionably John Fletcher. Never perhaps since the rise of Christianity has the mind which was in Christ Jesus been more faithfully copied than it was in the Vicar of Madeley. To say that he was a good Christian is saying too little. He was more than Christian, he was Christlike."
Fletcher's first biographer was John Wesley. In the preface to the funeral sermon preached in London on November 6th, 1785, he says: "I hastily put together some memorials of this great man, intending, if God permit, when I have more leisure and more materials, to write a fuller account of his life." Twelve months later, being then in the eighty-fourth year of his age, the following entry appears in his "Journal": "Oct. 25th, 1786. I now applied myself in earnest to the writing of Mr. Fletcher's life, having procured the best materials I could. To this I dedicated all the time I could spare till November, from five in the morning till eight at night. These are my studying hours; I cannot write longer in a day without hurting my eyes." The labour of love was soon completed, and Wesley published "A Short Account of the Life and Death of the Rev. John Fletcher," with the motto, "Sequor, non passibus æquis." That was no conventional eulogy—Wesley did not deal in them,—but, as we have seen, his heart's tribute to the holiest man he had ever known. And if the venerable Wesley counted himself but as one who followed, and that at a distance, the saintly Vicar of Madeley, he would be a hardy writer who could set himself to portray such a life and character unvisited by misgivings and unchastened by the responsibility that comes from the study of high examples of Christian holiness. But for the reader also, if his heart is as the writer's, there will be a share alike in the humiliation and in the hopes which the study of a holy life may well afford. This brief memoir of Fletcher of Madeley is attempted because no lapse of time or change of circumstances can make it unseasonable to contemplate a character like his. Such men do not die:
"——a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives."